Chapter Fifty-Six
The overwrought portrait of God in Piero’s office isn’t God.
It’s a Medici.
Every unkind, unholy thought I’ve had about it is suddenly justified.
’Tis why the devil’s throne room felt oddly familiar. I’d been there before.
Rain pelts my face, stinging and cold. I cling to the flying machine’s frame with tense fingers, feeling each jolting wing beat answered with a queasy lurch in my stomach. As we get closer to the river, the streets become streams.
The piazza outside the Palazzo della Signoria is already flooded.
The palazzo’s doors are already open, smashed to splinters, dark ink pouring inside the building in an endless, drowning gush.
“Watch out!” Leonardo cries.
A dark shadow arrows toward us: fangs and claws and fervid eyes.
The demon crashes into the flying machine.
The machine breaks apart, falling like a stone.
The gray-brown flood rushes to meet me. Water silences my scream, pitches down my throat. I thrust my head above the roiling surface.
I can’t see Leonardo.
A sudden wave bowls me over, drags me beneath again. It’s not deep, but the current is too powerful, and I can’t find my footing. My lungs sting, each wild movement burning up more and more air. Bubbles spurt from my nose. I’m getting swept away, I’m going to drown.
A hard pressure circles my wrist.
Pulls.
Leonardo helps me get my bearings. His hair is bronze-dark.
The fall tore off his doublet, and water has plastered his tunic to every pane of his chest so he may as well not be wearing it at all.
The locket with his mother’s hair juts out proudly over his heart.
He watches the demon circle and land on the palazzo’s crenellated wall with a rueful sigh.
“Perhaps ’tis for the best. I didn’t have a plan for landing it. ”
Arms around each other, we wade across the piazza. My body shudders with each step, the current tugging at our legs. Each stomp up the slick stairs through the palazzo’s smashed doors takes twice the effort it ought.
Then we’re inside.
Wavering reflections ribbon across the walls of the palazzo’s courtyard.
The magicked frescos watch the water rise with panic-stricken expressions.
The rain plummets down the courtyard’s open interior, an endless gray screen, as if the water itself knows what the devil wants destroyed and is eager to do his bidding.
We slosh over to the doors leading inside. For once, they’re unlocked.
When they close, the pummeling of the rain finally disappears.
Leaving us alone in the silence.
A portrait of angels regards us with stern, unblinking stares. Judgmental ones that remind me so much of my father, I rub my arms and look away. The sudden stillness unnerves me after the fervor of escape, makes me second-guess myself.
The devil’s portrait is just upstairs.
One knife stroke is all it will take to destroy it.
So why can’t I make my feet move?
There’s no reason to hesitate. The lie of the angels’ bargains was revealed the moment they became demons and attacked the very people they once obeyed. It’s the end of an era. The age of holy beauty is over.
Florence will never be the same.
Leonardo drags his fingertips down one of the angels’ faces, brow furrowed.
He only ever made one bargain—and still never told me what it was for.
Even when the rest of us fell over each other to sacrifice our lives and memories for magic, he stubbornly stuck to his methods.
Every artist learned to create without magic, and then, once we were good enough to be apprenticed, we decided our hands and eyes and minds weren’t enough anymore.
But it wasn’t that we weren’t good enough.
My perfect paintings are not what I remember best. It’s my brother’s delight seeing two foxes on a paper scrap. Leonardo’s eyes going soft holding his misshapen locket. I dismissed those pieces as juvenilia, a beginner’s embarrassing, earnest, amateur fumbles.
But that earnestness meant something. It showed the truth in my soul when nothing else could. I forgot that art isn’t brought to life by magic: It’s alive because of the impact it has on someone else.
What will it be like when the artists of Florence create only with their hands and hearts?
What would change if we believed in creativity and not magic?
What happens next?
“Virgil?” Leonardo shifts, his voice wary. “You’re not having misgivings, are you?”
“No.” I stoop to snag a jagged stone from the floor. Feel a thrill race through me at the thought of the canvas’s give. “Not about this.”
He grins at me—soaked, exhausted, but so beautiful that my chest clenches like a fist—and laces his fingers through mine.
We hurtle upstairs together.
The Medici office’s doors with their panels of the Last Judgment grow bigger and bigger at the end of the hall.
Leonardo reaches them first. Throws the doors open.
The Medici portrait sneers down at me, the entire world narrowing to the stern face. The canvas’s paint swirls strangely. A scaled foot with wicked claws emerges from the shimmer—
“Virgil, wait!”
But I’ve already leaped, stone angled to the canvas.
The very tip catches, and I rip. A force seems to rip into me at the very same time.
I fall to the floor, staring up at the torn edge of the canvas that starts curling upward, the dark red-black line that follows the spreading tear. The reptilian foot is sucked into the rip with a frustrated yowl.
Then I glance down at the dagger in my side.